


Acquainted With The Night

by FyrMaiden



Series: Human After All [3]
Category: Glee
Genre: Canonical Character Death - Finn Hudson, Gen, Self-Recrimination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 19:50:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3181031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel Berry is a star. As some point, she forgot how to shine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acquainted With The Night

**Author's Note:**

> _Being like you are,_  
>  Well this is something else, who would comprehend?  
> But some that do, lay claim 
> 
> (Title Poem: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/acquainted-with-the-night/)

When everything crashes down around her and she’s left outside of the lot with a box of her belongings and one glittering star in her hand that she gathers from the ground, Rachel Berry lets herself wallow. She lets herself live in her disappointment, in her tragedy, in all of her fading tomorrows. She lets herself have all of the days of Funny Girl that she gave up for a zero share flop, and she internalises every failure. She remembers Ohio, remembers telling Finn, once, that she was Tinkerbell, that she needed applause to _live._

That obviously isn’t true though, because the applause is over and she's still here, still breathing, still standing.

Kneeling. 

Sinking.

She is, she knows, lost. 

Rachel Berry. She put a star next to her name as a metaphor, because she is a star. 

Was a star. 

Now she’s a piece of cardboard covered in glitter, lying forlorn on the sidewalk. Face down, she’s not even covered in glitter. She’s a piece of cardboard that looks like a star from a distance.

She has, she realises with a creeping dread, become a commodity, a cliché. She has let herself become a person she doesn't want to be. She left Ohio to see her name in lights, to play Fanny Brice, to be appreciated and adored and _loved_. And then a brighter star beckoned and she let that thing lull her. And now she's standing friendless in the California sun, too embarrassed by her own recklessness to call anyone she used to know. 

Hollywood stole her soul, she thinks. It stole her voice, her confidence, her drive, her passion. 

And then she does exactly the opposite what Lee Paulblatt told her to do: she blames herself. She was awful, not her vehicle. She let down her co-stars, her network, and her zero share audience, and probably her dads as well. She, Rachel Berry, ruined the entire trajectory of her now-dead career. 

She's standing on a street corner with a cardboard star in her hand to prove it. 

She remembers Finn when she is sitting in her shoebox apartment, eating corn chips from a family bag and watching terrible television that keeps getting renewed. Even this is less than she has imagined, compared to the loft she and Kurt had in New York. She piles her hair on top of her head in a messy bun and wears a sweater that is almost certainly Blaine’s, via Kurt, and she thinks about Finn and how, after he shot himself in the leg and was discharged and too embarrassed to just call her up and tell her, he took off and hiked the Appalachian trail for three months. Rachel has never hiked anywhere, but she buys herself some good hiking shoes and uses her phone to get herself lost in the Hollywood hills. Her legs burn, her heart hurts, and her head is filled with doubt, but she does it. The month she has on her lease she uses to learn to hike. She learns, in the hills, to like herself again. Standing at the heads of trails, nothingness spreading out before her for weeks, she feels the way she imagines Finn felt on the trail from Maine to Georgia. She feels weightless, free, and she breathes. She stares up into the cloudless blue of the sky and thanks a star she cannot see for believing in her always.

Once her lease expires, she packs her loneliness into boxes and ships them to Ohio. She puts her clothes into a suitcase, buys herself a car, and drives up the Pacific Highway. She writes herself a bucket list on her phone’s To Do app, ticks them off as she achieves them. She tickles manta rays at the aquarium in Monterey, listens to a lot of new music and old favourites, sings at anonymous karaoke bars, and sees a lot of sites. She takes selfies with America’s biggest ball of twine that she goes to text to Kurt but doesn’t, and then she stops and thinks about her friends, about all the people she’s let down, all the people who tried to tell her that she was becoming a monster, sold to whoever could pay the most for her.

In a motel in Oregon, she cries. 

In a way, it's to clear her head. 

In another, it’s her realisation that she - and only she - can be responsible for where she goes from here. 

Once her phone is full of memories, and her heart is ready to try again, Rachel heads north, back to the good old mid-west, to the familiar and the comfortable. She buys an oversized hat in a mall in Dayton, and huge sunglasses to hide behind. She shaves her legs, pays to have her eyebrows tinted and shaped, buys news lipstick and penny loafers and smiles at herself in the mirror. It feels slightly false, but it’s a smile all the same. It’s a start.

She heads back into Lima on a warm day in early spring, rolls up outside of her dads’ house and empties her car of her suitcase and her iPod, and lets herself back in with the key she has always kept for when she comes home.

Walking back into her bedroom should feel suffocating. It’s mostly just disappointing. This was not how she planned to come home, not how she planned her grand return. Her plans have changed a lot since she was 16, when her biggest plan was to get out of Lima. But it was here that she learned to be self-reliant, learned to stand on her own two feet and own her talent and her dreams, learned to plan her own trajectory. It was in Lima that she learned she could be likeable, that she could have friends.

And she hopes that it will be in Lima that she learns those things again.


End file.
